Persian is natively spoken by about 73 million people, primarily in Afghanistan, where it is one of the official languages alongside Pashto. It is integral to Afghan cultural identity, known for its poetry, music, and art, particularly during the Persianate periods of Central Asian history. Written in the Perso-Arabic script, Persian grammar features a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order, a system of noun cases, and a complex system of verb conjugations that indicate tense, aspect, and mood.
Stats
Language Family: Indo-European
Writing System: Perso-Arabic / other form
Writing System Type: Abjad
Writing Direction: R to L
Tones / Pitch Accent: N
Morphology: Agglutinative
Cases: 2
Grammatical Gender / Noun Class: 0
Number of Verb Tenses: 10
Word Order: SOV
Number of Vowels (Monophthongs): 8
Number of Consonants: 26
Areas Where Spoken
Afghanistan (official) (33.0%) (13.6 mil)
Iran (official) (56.6%) (50.1 mil)
Tajikistan (official) (68.1%) (6.78 mil)
Uzbekistan (9.0%) (3.21 mil)
Resources
Books
Storybooks Pakistan - graded level Farsi children's stories with autoplay audio
News
Websites
Tajik
Farsi
Lessons
Parler pars - Pars Today - 166 lessons taught in French
Easy Persian - More than 180 lessons on mostly grammar and more , lessons 140 to 165 are downloadable audiobooks and videobooks
Jahanshiri - Comprehensive grammar and vocab lists
PersianDee - 32 lessons with vocab and more
Book2 - Phrasebook course with audio
LanguageCourse.net - 5000 word vocabulary trainer
Farsidic - EN<=>FA dictionary
Langmedia Five Colleges - About 170 short video monologues with bilingual transcripts
GLOSS - Audio with transcript : Dari and Farsi
Targoman - Iranian Online Translation Service Persian to/from Some Other Languages (Usually works better than Google Translate)
Gratis Global - Comprehensive list of free resources
Videos
Maktabkhooneh - Free Video Courses from the Best Iranian Universities, Free courses on Faradars, the Largest Resource of Educational - Videos in Iran (Most courses are in Persian)
Aparat - The Largest Video Sharing Service in Iran
FarsiWizard (vocab, grammar)
Radio
RadioFarda - Local music
RadioJavan - Local, broadcast in English)